Blue Laws
Bergen County’s blue laws — the rules that keep most of the county’s stores closed on Sundays — are being scrutinized for signs of weakness by groups that believe the time is right to repeal them.
Politicians have generally considered the blue laws to be invulnerable since 1993, when county residents voted, by a wide margin, to keep them in place. But recent attacks on the laws have caused opponents to question the need for them.
“These are 19th-century laws. Wake up. We’re in the 21st century,” said Rosemary Shashoua, a Westwood grandmother has started a grass-roots campaign to repeal the blue laws.
Any attempt to eliminate the laws, however, will have to overcome strong opposition from residents of Paramus, and other Bergen County residents who say the Sunday laws have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with their right to have one weekend day free of traffic.
“As long as I am mayor I will continue to protect them,” Paramus Mayor Rich LaBarbiera told The Record of Woodland Park. “They are the integral thread to our quality of life in Paramus.”
Bergen County is the last county in the state to retain blue laws, which prohibit sales of certain goods on Sundays, and keep all of the county’s department stores and malls closed, with the exception of mall restaurants and movie theaters. Paramus has even more restrictive laws that prohibit all work in the borough on Sunday. NJ.com
Truth by Calendar
The most telling line in that piece is the Rosemary’s comment “Wake up. We’re in the 21st Century!” as if the calendar is what determines what’s right and wrong. That idea that it is in fact the calendar that determines right from wrong is so common and so deep within our assumptions that it colors nearly everything we think about right and wrong. The logic goes like this. “Today we know so much more about things than previous generations did. Science and technology proves it. We have clearly evolved or progressed beyond the dim, unenlightened assumptions of our ancestors and so much morality is in fact self-evident to us.
Christian Smith, a sociologist has done in-depth research on the religious, spiritual and moral assumptions of American youth. You can read his findings in Soul Searching and the follow up Souls in Transition. Tim Keller summarizes his findings in three characteristics.
1. American youth have very strong moral feelings. Very much against injustice, violation of rights, exploitation of the poor, etc.
2. They are moral relativists. They will repeated say that no one has the right to say what is right or wrong for someone else. There are two aspects to this moral relativism.
a. Morality is person specific, you don’t have the right to choose for another.
b. Morality is culturally relative: every culture has the right to decide what is right for them.
3. They believe that morality is self-evident.
It doesn’t take too much thought to realize that these positions are incoherent. Keller goes on to note that it you ask a young person whether it is wrong for some countries to withhold driver’s licenses from women they’d say it is wrong, they just know it and it is always wrong. That of course, violates their idea that morality is culturally relative.
Christian Smith notes this. Continue reading →
